SciNOvA: A Measurement of Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering in a Narrow-Band Beam

Abstract

We propose to construct and deploy a fine-grained detector in the Fermilab NOvA 2 GeV narrow-band neutrino beam. In this beam, the detector can make unique contributions to the measurement of quasi-elastic scattering, neutral-current elastic scattering, neutral-current π 0 production, and enhance the NOvA measurements of electron neutrino appearance. To minimize cost and risks, the proposed detector is a copy of the SciBar detector originally built for the K2K long baseline experiment and used recently in the SciBooNE experiment.

Neutrinos

“…Additional experiments in beams of different energies provide a valuable cross-check on the underlying energy dependence of physics models as well as the background calculations of the experiments. For example, the NOvA experiment, which will soon run in the NuMI off-axis neutrino beam, offers a unique opportunity to add to the world's neutrino interaction data by measuring cross sections with its near detector as well as with a possible upgrade to a relatively-inexpensive fine-grained detector such as the proposed SciNOvA experiment [225,202].…”